Empowered to Explore: Driving Development Through Mobility Exploration

While all newborns are dependent on others for mobility, the onset of self-initiated mobility experiences, such as crawling and walking, opens a new world of exploration, learning, and independence, triggering a developmental cascade, driving tremendous developmental gains across all domains. In contrast, infants and young children who have mobility delays or limitations often remain dependent on others for their mobility. This continued dependency increases the risk of secondary impairments and delays across developmental domains, and severely restricts opportunities to learn through exploration. ON Time Mobility aims to disrupt this cycle of dependency through the use of mobility technologies, such as power mobility devices, to provide infants and young children who have mobility delays or limitations with self-initiated mobility experiences at the same ages and stages as their typically developing peers. Despite strong evidence supporting powered mobility as a means to enhance development and participation, power mobility device use use in children under five remains extremely limited. In this session, we will critically appraise the growing body of evidence supporting the use of ON Time power mobility to advance global development in infants and young children who have mobility delays or limitations, including a recent randomized controlled clinical trial that found statistically significant mean developmental improvements in cognitive, receptive and expressive communication, fine motor, gross motor, adaptive behavior, and social-emotional behavior following short-term power mobility use. We will discuss existing and emerging evidence-based frameworks to guide and support clinical implementation of power mobility interventions and explore strategies to facilitate power mobility conversations with families, policymakers, and other stakeholders about the use of power mobility.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

1. Discuss the 5 interconnected principles of the ON Time Mobility framework.
2. Discuss 3 key research findings to support the evidence-based use of power mobility interventions in infants and young children who have mobility delays or limitations.
3. List 3 strategies to support clinical implementation of ON Time Mobility experiences.
4. Identify two communication domains in the Bayley-4 that showed statistically significant improvement in a recent study involving short term power mobility use in infants and young children with mobility delays.

This course meets the requirement for Professional Development hours towards your ASHA renewal since it is approved by TSHA! You can count these hours towards ASHA renewal when you submit your Compliance Form.